CALIFORNIANS: THE GUINEA PIGS FOR OBAMACARE

To call Obamacare flawed is an understatement on the order of calling the Amazon River a tiny stream. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 is so fraught with internal contradictions that it sometimes seems designed to collapse the existing U.S. health-care system. Two obvious examples:

• Beginning next Jan. 1, most companies with at least 50 full-time employees have to offer health insurance. But if they don’t, the fine is a pittance – $2,000 per employee per year – compared with the cost of providing health insurance. This creates a gigantic incentive for businesses to drop health coverage and push their employees toward getting insurance though government-run exchanges set up by Obamacare. If a struggling company could swiftly become a prosperous one by offloading 70 percent or more of the cost of providing health coverage, many thousands are going to do it. Some might face shareholder suits if they don’t.

• Also beginning next January, individuals without employer-provided health insurance will face fines under an income-based formula that mandates a penalty of less than $1,000 for those making under $40,000 a year. That $40,000 is significantly higher than the median household income for adults younger than 35, a subset that’s much healthier than older adults. All adults will have an incentive to only buy health insurance when they get sick; under Obamacare, they can no longer be rejected for pre-existing conditions. But these young, healthy adults will have a gigantic incentive.

Now if one lived in a well-governed state, even one that broadly supported Obamacare, the logical thing to do would be to slow-walk its implementation, as allowed by the 2012 Supreme Court decision that upheld the Affordable Care Act’s legality but limited the federal government’s power to compel states to implement it.

But we live in California, where the idea of Obamacare is so beloved that little details such as wanting to have a workable plan are brushed aside. So on Wednesday, one of the biggest cheers Gov. Jerry Brown got in his State of the State address was his declaration that he would call a concurrent special session of the Legislature as part of the Golden State’s push to be the first state to be fully ready to implement Obamacare come Jan. 1. Bills passed in a special session can take effect more quickly.

All so California can be ground zero for a law giving employers huge incentives to stop providing health coverage and giving young people huge incentives to never buy coverage.

And there’s an additional twist: California already has both shortages of family doctors in most regions and the nation’s oldest cohort of family doctors, with nearly 30 percent older than 60. If you add 2 million people to those being treated by these family physicians – the minimum California increase expected in 2014 because of Obamacare – what happens? It becomes far harder to get an appointment, and the headache gets progressively worse as more aging family doctors retire.

We suspect it won’t be long before millions of Californians wish their leaders weren’t quite so gung-ho about making them be the guinea pigs for Obamacare.